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Literature Lovers' Night Out™️

Mark your calendars for another great LITERATURE LOVERS' NIGHT OUT program on Wednesday, June 13th featuring -

Liam Callahan

In Paris By the Book the marvelously gifted Liam Callanan tells a spellbinding story of reading and writing, romance and marriage, French frozen food and a small bookshop. I loved walking the streets of Marais with his eloquent narrator. And I loved how Callanan simultaneously reveals the history of her marriage and of her adopted city. Open a bottle of wine, open this wise and wonderful book, and enjoy. — Margot Livesey, author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

J. Courtney Sullivan

J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Commencement, Maine andThe Engagements. Maine was named a Best Book of the Year by Time magazine, and a Washington Post Notable Book for 2011. The Engagements was one of People Magazine’s Top Ten Books of 2013 and an Irish Times Best Book of the Year. It is soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon and distributed by Fox 2000, and it will be translated into 17 languages. Courtney’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Real Simple, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among many others. She is a co-editor, with Courtney Martin, of the essay anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sarah Healy

Sarah Healy is the author of Can I Get an Amen? and House of Wonder. The Sisters Chase is her third novel. A native of New Jersey, she now lives in Vermont with her husband and three children, where she divides her time between writing, raising her young sons and working in sales and marketing.

“'The Sisters Chase' is that rare thing, a slow burner that conceals its cunning and sneaks up on you unawares."
—New York Times

Paddy Hirsch

Award-winning financial journalist Paddy Hirsch, whose commentaries on the economy as senior producer of NPR’s Marketplace reveal an intimate knowledge of the twists and turns of today’s markets, takes us back to 1799 Wall Street, the source of the title of his novel The Devil’s Half Mile. Part thriller, part love story and part cautionary tale, this page-turner also carries intimations of the future. Alexander Hamilton feared that the financial crisis of 1792 would destroy the fledgling United States and yet the bankers and traders Hirsch introduces us to care only about manipulating the system for their own profit. There are a few honest men. One of them, Frances Flanagan, was driven to suicide by the part he played in a financial scam – but did he really kill him self?

One of the features of old New York in The Devil’s Half Mile is the interaction between the Irish and black communities who shared the same neighborhoods. Hirsch’s portrait of a city struggling to be born is vivid and part of the fun is comparing it to today’s New York. Amazing that this cluster of muddy, odorous streets with its rag-tag population could become the greatest city in the world. Hirsch says that he started out to write a history book, but found himself introducing a murder and watching as his fictional characters pushed out Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, though both men make cameo experiences. “I really really wanted to tell a story,” Hirsch says. And he does – an exciting one – but you can’t read it without thinking of today. As Hirsch says in an after note, “Many people might look back at those days wistfully; it’s certainly easy enough to find Wall Street players happy to argue that banks and investment houses can regulate themselves and government should just get out of the way. Unfortunately, experience has proved that a poorly regulated system is too easily abused, and that cynical bankers and traders – whether frock-coated and bewigged in 1799 or clad in business casual today – are quite willing to abuse it.– Mary Pat Kelly Irish America